Robotics Companies Garner Funds for Converging Technologies

Grishin Robotics has created a $100 million fund for robotics investments, and Intel’s IoT Group is absorbing Yogitech. These are just some of the deals inspired by the greater safety and productivity promised by the next generation of robots, AI, and IoT applications.

Some of the signs of the maturing robotics industry include more robotics investment, mergers and acquisitions, and support for the component technologies that will be part of robots and self-driving cars.

Grishin Robotics has raised a $100 million fund for investing in robotics hardware and software. The venture capital firm was founded in 2012, and its first fund was $25 million.

“People were skeptical of a robotics-only fund in 2012 when we launched,” said Dmitry Grishin, founder of Grishin Robotics and co-founder and CEO of Moscow-based Internet firm Mail.Ru Group.

Telepresence provider Double Robotics is among the recipients of funding from Grishin.

The fund will support startups driven by the “six pillars of the Hardware Revolution — cheaper components, ubiquitous connectivity, smartphone penetration, 3D printing, disruption of [the] supply chain, and crowdfunding,” said the New York-based company. “By 2020, [the] total value of the markets driven by these changes is estimated to reach $1 trillion.”

Grishin Robotics also said that it is expanding its focus from support of consumer-oriented companies in the U.S. to include business-to-business robotics applications and Europe. It is opening a London office.

The fund will allocate up to $10 million per company and is looking for investment opportunities in material handling and collaborative robots, artificial intelligence, and data analytics and the industrial Internet of Things (IoT).

Intel Buys Yogitech for ‘functional security’

Speaking of IoT, Intel Corp. has bought Yogitech SpA, a startup developing “functional security” for robots and self-driving cars. Pisa, Italy-based Yogitech said its technology is important to developing confidence in the control over data collected by multiple sensors.

“The industry is now moving from automating data to inform better decisions to automating actions informed by real-time data,” said Ken Caviasca, vice president and general manager of platform engineering and development at Intel’s IoT Group. “You can see this evolution in the autonomous vehicle prototypes that nearly all have Intel inside.”

“By Intel’s own estimates, 30 percent of the IoT market segment will require functional safety by 2020,” he said.

Yogitech will become part of the IoT Group, since the chipmaker has an interest in providing processors for automated vehicles. Sales of PCs and laptops have been declining, so Intel and Qualcomm have been investing in robotics, aerialdrones, wearables, and artificial intelligence.

Connecting the dots for robotics investors

Sensors and the intelligence to connect the data they gather to robot behavior are widely cited as causes for increased investor interest in collaborative robots, self-driving cars, and industrial automation.

Last year, mergers and acquisitions in the robotics sector reportedly totaled more than $2 billion, and a few funds have emerged to promote and take advantage of these converging technologies.

Horizon Robotics Inc., which is working on connecting hardware, software, cloud computing, and big data for AI, has received an unspecified amount of venture capital from Yuri Milner, founder of investment firm Digital Sky Technologies Ltd.

Kai Yu, who once led the Institute of Deep Learning at Chinese search engine company Baidu Inc., founded Beijing-based Horizon Robotics last year. Milner is also a co-founder of Mail.Ru Group.

St. Johns, Newfoundland-based Agile plans to work with Shanghai-based Gaitech on a “plug-and-play” platform to make robot development easier. Agile reportedly also received more than $1 million in funding.

“These devices will change the way companies develop their robots to include our highly reliable, fast, and dynamic components,” Terry added.

“We believe that the combination of Agile’s state-of-the-art [field-programmable gate array] technologies with our expertise in ROS will result in several exciting new products for the high-growth global robotics market,” said Jenssen Chang, Gaitech CEO.

Eugene Demaitre was a senior editor for Robotics Business Review. He has worked as an editor at BNA, Computerworld, and TechTarget. Demaitre has a master's degree in international affairs from the George Washington University.